Friday, July 7, 2017

Baidu’s Project Apollo Takes Flight

Like its namesake, Baidu’s Project Apollo aims to redefine the possibilities for human travel. But instead of landing men on the moon like NASA’s version of the program, vehicles in this initiative must learn to drive themselves. In April, Baidu announced Project Apollo — an open source platform for self-driving that includes hardware, software and cloud data services for autonomous vehicles. The initial release arrived this week at Baidu Create, the company’s first AI developer conference.Project Apollo is adding partners from throughout the automotive ecosystem to speed adoption of the technology. Baidu announced that the Apollo Ecosystem Partners Alliance now includes over 50 members — automakers, tier 1 suppliers, component producers, startups, academic institutions and government departments. Among them is NVIDIA, whose technology will be used from the server to the car, including Tesla GPUs and DRIVE PX, along with software including CUDA and TensorRT.